


And what are you going to do

by musicforswimming



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Community: rarewomen, Dreams, Enemy Lovers, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-30
Updated: 2012-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-04 14:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/394998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicforswimming/pseuds/musicforswimming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma dreams of a castle, and of the person inside of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And what are you going to do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheeana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/gifts).



> For the rarewomen challenge at LJ. Title is from Mary Oliver's "Poppies".

Mary Margaret knows when Emma has the dreams. She doesn’t know she knows; Emma doesn’t understand how _she_ knows she knows, except that she does, she feels it someplace dark and warm inside of herself.

The town is so quiet you could hear a pin drop when you wake up in the middle of the night. Always when Emma has the dreams, she hears Mary Margaret shifting and mumbling in the next room. Whatever it is that binds everyone together in this town, whatever the bright thread stitching them into one big Storybrooke quilt, it binds her to people who are okay, after all.

She listens for it, listens for Mary Margaret. She pushes down the thing inside of her, like the puppy that can’t be left alone, the thing that wants to wriggle and whimper until someone just happens to notice. She’s done that all her life, not in a poor little stoic girl way, just because sometimes you have to get shit done.

Here in this town, with its unreasonably high intrigue level and its pin-drop-silent nights -- here in these rooms, schoolteacher warm -- _here_ , trying to settle back into sleep, she says to herself, _something is not right_.

 

It’s a beautiful place, the one she finds herself in when she dreams. Beautiful and full of shadows. Opulent and sprawling, its hallways wide and its carpets ankle-deep. The windows are huge, those hundreds of little diamond shapes you see in fancy old buildings all stitched together with iron, and the swollen black clouds seem to feed off all the light. It’s not just that it’s dark, it’s that something is actually leaching the light from inside the castle.

Castle -- yeah, that fits. It’s a castle, she knows it is, somehow, not just someplace big and fancy and beautiful. Well, all right, it’s not that much of a mystery, really, is it? Henry’s made sure she’s got fairy tales on the brain for months now, blossoming inside her brain like milk poured into coffee, until everything tastes like it -- so it’s either gonna be a castle or...who knows, a bridge with a troll under it, maybe, or a house made out of candy.

And of course, this is nothing like Cinderella’s castle at Disneyworld. Well, Emma assumes so, anyway; it’s not like she actually has the experience to compare, but if nothing else, it’s hard to imagine little kids getting hugs from giant mice anywhere near here. It’s hard to imagine anything alive at all here. The thick carpet swallows up her footsteps as she wanders empty hallway after empty hallway. She wonders if the feeling that nothing can survive here, that nothing could be alive here in the first place _to_ survive, includes her.

 

It's after the clock's tolling first rings out over town that she first has the dream. She doesn't remember it the first morning--she wakes up from it briefly, blinks into the darkness of her bedroom blearily, and within moments she's assumed that she just woke up because she had to pee. Back in bed, she rolls over, drops back into sleep, and promptly forgets about it.

 

Until the next time the dream slithers into her mind--which is how it feels, although properly one ought to say her mind slithers into the dream. But this place, the very air of the castle, clutches at her and coaxes her through the hallways. If Emma was the kind of person who kept a dream journal (which she hasn't been, since she was seven and, five entries in, one of the other girls in the shelter found it and read aloud all the details of that one with the peach pie, and Emma got another entry in her record for fighting), she'd say that the dream was having her, not the other way around. That's how it feels, with the way it keeps coming for her.

It doesn't feel like an ordinary dream, where everything's misty and dripping with suggestion. Everything here could be real, and although it must mean something that she keeps coming back, she's damned if she knows what that is.

 

There's something going on at the school, some bake sale Henry nagged her to make something for. She arrives, at last, to drop off paper plates and napkins and a couple jugs of lemonade from the store, as a compromise.

The mayor, of course, has made apple pie. Apple pie _s_ , actually, three of them.

"I thought apples weren't in season yet." Emma's voice is as mild as the spring around them. She knows that because she worked really freaking hard to keep it that mild, reminding herself that it'd be so much more fun that way.

"I have my secrets," Regina says, equally balmy-voiced. She goes one better and has a smile to match. She just got the apples from the store, of course, or maybe has some preserved or whatever. That's all Emma meant, to remind Regina (and herself) that Regina has to go to the store for the same apples from wherever that's _not_ Storybrooke as the rest of them when the season's wrong.

But Emma finds herself staring at the pies, and can feel her forehead wrinkling just the slightest bit -- not a real frown, just like she's trying to figure out the tip. It's backfired on her.

Still, even Regina can't work miracles when Emma jostles Mary Margaret just so, and even as they both gush apologies and grab the napkins -- "I figured I should bring plenty," Emma explains -- she's actively fighting a smile of her own now, having gone from spring straight into summer at the way Regina's jaw is tightening.

 

Her mind starts to play tricks on her, after too much time wandering the castle's silent stone halls. She'll glimpse something disappearing around a corner, just as she's about to turn the other way -- a boot, maybe -- or hear someone humming. Lingering by one of the windows, she'll swear the clouds parted long enough for her to see something outside. There's a courtyard down there, maybe, or mountains in the distance.

At one point, she comes upon an entire table, a feast laid out. There's no way of knowing how long ago it was abandoned. She feels like a castle ought to have cats or dogs, or at least mice, singing or not, to get in here and get at the scraps, and if there aren't those, then at the _very_ least it ought to get rotten, right? But no, that would be some kind of life, and even though the tipped goblets' contents have faded to purply stains on the tablecloth, and then those stains have started to fade, there's nothing. The food looks as fine as it did whenever it was first served. Or, well, whenever it was half-eaten after it was first served.

There are bowls of apples placed along the table. They haven't been touched; they're the only thing that hasn't been. Centerpieces, Emma assumes. Maybe that's a seasonal thing? It's probably a useful clue. Well, it's probably a clue, who knows whether it's useful.

That's the other thing different from dreams; she sounds like herself.

 

It's all like that, all clenched jaws and smiles like fancy silverware, so shiny and sparkly that you know it's taken a lot of work to get them that way. It's all like that, always.

Most of the time.

And then suddenly, one time, it's not.

 

All she hears, at first, is the wind. It has to be the wind; the castle is empty. She's been here long enough to know that. If, sometimes, it sounds like words, like whispers, like someone trying to speak to her, then it must be like that sense that someone's watching her, that she's just missed catching sight of someone -- it's all in her head.

But one night she hears a voice, clear as rain.

 

"You don't belong here." It's morning, bright and lazy, both of them lounging in bed with coffee and toast, having bickered half-heartedly over who got which sections of the paper first. Regina expressed, by rote, shock that Emma wanted anything more than the comics and maybe the sports section; Emma made sure she dripped gooey melted peanut butter onto the front page; neither of them did anything, for once, with the whole of themselves and their hate. Maybe they fucked all the rage out of them, except having taken the night to sleep and gotten some food and caffeine in them, you'd think they'd've recharged their respective supplies by now.

Regina's quiet, almost gentle, as she says the words, as gentle as someone like her can ever be.

(Although Emma's discovered that given sufficient motivation, Regina can actually be _very_ \-- no, don't go into that, it'll just make this worse.)

Whatever this new tactic of niceness is, Regina's throwing herself into it with her characteristic thoroughness, clearly. Breakfast in bed the morning after (to say nothing of what that's an after _to_ ), quiet voice, and even now she doesn't follow this up with further scolding, with some kind of James Bond villain-y speech about her grand plans and how Emma's just a pawn in them.

"Huh," Emma manages, and looks up. She looks just beyond Regina, doesn't quite look at the expression on her face. Boy howdy does she want to put her fist through something, all of a sudden, or maybe several somethings, or maybe everything ever, because _Jesus frigging Christ_ she can feel the sting in her eyes now, and everything feels a little too big for her hands, like she's a little kid in a Halloween costume with her badge and plastic gun that just looks super-duper-get-in-trouble-at-an-airport-realistic. Which is extraordinarily messed up even for her, given that this is the morning after.

"Emma," Regina's voice is low and _ragged_ , like she doesn't know entirely what to say here herself, like this _isn't_ part of the plan all along. Like she is an actual human woman capable of pain ( _but you knew that already, oh ho ho yes you did,_ Emma thinks, and then thinks she's going to be sick remembering that) and she is feeling actual human emotional pain right now, doing this. "This was -- "

"You're good," Emma manages, and mushes the toast, peanut butter side down, into the front page. Might as well take the regression thing to its fullest, right? Which, again, ew, but whatever, she can talk to Hopper about that later. She's sort of torn between continuing to talk and try to use her words as the fists that, as noted, she longs to put through everything, and not risking it, because Jesus frigging _Christ_ she is actually about to start frigging crying. "You are _good_." Her voice does this unbelievably awful little cracking thing when she says that, but maybe she can blame it on the movement. She's hopping out of bed, grabbing her jeans and her bra and where in God's name is her underwear?

Regina is still just looking down at the newly-toasted newspaper, and finally she sighs and looks up. "Listen," she starts, but Emma's hand is already on the door. "Don't, don't just leave it like this, I need to -- "

Emma turns, and gives her the finger, and, upon glimpsing the still-sleeping Henry through the open door, goes out the window instead. It's a drop to the garden, but not too far of one -- she's had far worse. Swans always land on their feet. That's completely how that saying goes. From this angle, Emma can't see Regina, who's probably stripping the sheets now so she can have them washed, or maybe just burned. But she gives the window the finger anyway, and kicks one of the trees on the way out.

 

She's looking for something in particular, this time. The castle's utter bigness isn't interesting now, or even frightening; it's a pain in the ass. Emma grabs an axe off the wall in the big room filled with weapons, at one point, and just starts chopping things at random because the castle is pissing her off so much, begging her to help it by bringing her here and then leaving her to figure it all out for herself.

"What the hell?" she demands of art and furniture, of the lovely vases she hurls against the stones -- whose pieces she then steps and grinds into the floor. It's like nails on a chalkboard, the crackling whine under her boots, but that, along with watching the lovely fragile things going to powder, is also satisfying, in some twisted way. Cathartic, maybe, filling the air with the same awful spine-tingling _wrong_ ness she's been lugging around for months now. "What the _actual_ \-- _friggin'_ \-- _hell_?"

 

Mary Margaret's out when Emma gets home, thank God, because this is quite possibly the most terrible moment of her adult life. Not because of the pain itself, but because of the utter humiliation of lying in bed, curled up in a ball, rocking and snot-faced and gasping like she's going to shake to pieces.

It makes sense, she tries to tell herself, in Hopper's kind and timid chirps. Growing up in the system, a lifetime of rejection, that's all. Nothing but lingering childhood trauma. You're not that girl, Emma, the one who goes to pieces when she gets dumped, especially not when it was just hatesex to begin with.

(By now it's not Hopper's voice anymore, obviously, because the thought of him trying to get out the word 'hatesex' actually makes her smile for a second, and then, maybe because the two are so close in their mouth-shapes anyway, she even coughs out a laugh. Which she promptly regrets, because it gives way to a fresh round of sobs.)

 

But she can't get to every room, not to really destroy things. So fine, screw these assholes, if they don't want her, that's an easy problem to solve, they're not even worth the energy of wrecking everything. And instead of going up the stairs, she takes them down. Instead of following that thing inside of her that pulls like a magnet and tells her which way is forward, she goes in the opposite direction, determined to find a gate.

 

"I don't know what you want me to say."

Emma raises her eyebrows. "That's not stopping you from talking, though," she points out, and then looks back at her file, which is actually just the list Mary Margaret emailed her of stuff they need from the store. She picks up a pen and adds "maybe something else" to the bottom because she can't think of anything else they actually need but she wants to write something, to look busy.

Regina scoffs, but instead of turning around she plunks herself down into the chair across the desk, crosses her really pretty, hose-misted legs at the ankles, folds her hands in her lap, and gazes across the table at Emma.

Emma looks over the folder at her, picks up her pen again, and writes "plus another thing", considering all the while whether she managed to make the peer over the folder the kind of casually confused look she wanted it to be. She frowns while she's worrying about it, staring at Mary Margaret's request for paper towels and noting "Bounty or store brand? Do they have store brand?" She doesn't think Storybrooke's store is big enough to have its own brands, and Regina is still just looking at her, but at least she decided to put on makeup today, and actually do something with her hair. Who knows why, but who cares, anyway, she was gonna look spectacular, even if it was for the empty station (it being Ruby's day off). She's got the best light in the room, too, through some freakishly good timing that has the sunbeam turning the edges of her vision to gold as it filters through her hair.

At last, she breaks the silence herself. "Did you want me to pay you back for the paper?" she asks, not looking up from the list. "You know, the one I rubbed the toast into?"

Regina sighs, but it's not one of her usual sighs. It's something softer, wistful as the ragweed that meant summer was over and school would start again soon. "Is that really..." she starts. From the corner of her eye, Emma sees that she just looks down at her hands when she trails off, and then she gets up and walks out.

The sun keeps moving, so soon Emma doesn't have the light anymore, but who cares, anyway, whether she looks spectacular for the empty station?

 

Every night, now, she's in the castle, and every night, it takes her a little less time to remember oh right, screw you. She drifts onwards like a fallen leaf caught in a stream for awhile, tugged by something sweet and sad. Then she recalls that this castle is a total dick that dragged her into it, that invited her and folded itself around her, and that then gave her absolutely nothing to work with. At which point she begins making her very certain but infinitely more difficult way back as she came.

Now and then, again, she thinks she hears something, or feels a tug on her elbow -- a ragged "not like this," once, that opens up a gash on her heart and freezes her where she is for a long few seconds. She can't move forward for the wound inside of her, but she's unwilling to turn around and look for the cry's source, either. And there was a hand on her right arm, catching her, she knows there was, so she won't even look down, won't look anywhere but forward. There's an empty frame on the wall to her left, and a break in the clouds sends a little light glittering off the remaining shards. It blinds her for a moment, and she breathes deeply, and finds that there is no knife in her heart, that the stillness remains.

Emma looks at what remains of the mirror first, though, and only on finding nothing in the pieces but herself does she look around.

She wakes up crying, and it takes her a few seconds to orient herself enough to walk to the bathroom. When she leaves it, the kitchen light is on, a buttery little fortress, and Mary Margaret is making them tea, unasked.

Neither of them speaks, but they sit on the couch together, and Mary Margeret strokes her hair and gentles her back to sleep. The sweetness ought to hurt, but it's such an unfamiliar sort of kindness that it can't trip over anything in Emma's heart.

 

The lighting at the diner isn't quite as great as that day in her office, but it's not terrible, and at least it's more consistent. When Regina shows up, Emma knows it's her, which is super-annoying and says some things that she really doesn't care to think about, but probably knew already, which is even more annoying.

"I really wish you'd just let me say my piece." Regina is, as usual, picture perfect, but the fact that it's usual means it's less special, right? Which means that Emma actually looks at least as good, since she had an unexpected stroke of good looks, because she let Ruby give her that ridiculously expensive new mascara at the station this morning, and then she let Ruby guilt her into trying it then and there, no matter how many sarcastic comments about professionalism she made.

"You made yourself clear," Emma says. She's glad it wasn't lip gloss Ruby gave her. She's never figured out how to sip coffee with that on without leaving more of it behind, and it'd be so much harder to play it cool that way.

Regina waves away the menu and stares at their reflections in the glass along the wall. Emma glances up once, just long enough to confirm that she, of course, still looks like a mess next to Regina, no matter what she might've been feeling like, but she also sees that Regina seems to be looking past her own eyes, like she's really looking at something just beyond the wall.

"You don't belong here." Regina's voice is shockingly soft and kind. She drops her eyes from the mirror to her hands, folded on the counter in front of her.

The kindness, of course, is what does it, what keeps Emma from saying anything. Has the entire place disappeared, or is that howling, lonely wind just in her ears? Probably just her. That would make more sense.

"Well, I am here." It's the perfect comeback, right? It takes her a few seconds, with the wind inside of her head hurricane-ing along, but it's pretty stellar as a response to that. Except Emma says it, lets it echo into the warm, not-actually-hurricane-struck spring day, and absolutely nothing is different except that she feels a tiny little bit better for having got off her one great comeback to one nonsensical line.

"But you don't belong here." Regina actually let Emma's fantastic comeback sit there in the air for a moment. That was either nice of her or really harsh, because it starts Emma wondering whether it wasn't actually clever but just kind of like something a six year old would try. When she can make her thoughts heard over the hurricane, anyway.

"But I _am_ here. We could do this for awhile, you know." This is probably a bluff. Maybe not, though.

"Let's not," Regina says. Under the counter, she takes Emma's hand in her own. Emma can't bring herself to look at Regina, can't breathe for a second, for three seconds, for thirty seconds.

But she sees, peripherally, that Regina's just as still as she is. It's a trick. If Emma were smart, she'd ignore it, and if she were really smart, she'd start trying to figure out what Regina's strategy might be, what Emma's own defense game will require.

Smarts, though, have never really been Emma's forte.

 

She finds the room, once, the room that the magnet in her gut has been pulling her to inevitably. It's not all that different from any other room in the castle, from any of the open wounds of rooms that press down on her shoulders, that whisper that she doesn't belong and then, far louder, beg her not to leave...just yet. Not 'till they've said their piece. Not 'till they've done this just right.

"Hello?" she says, as she crosses the threshold into that last room. There's a mirror there, one that's not yet shattered, and something about it grabs her gut and pulls, that's how much its familiarity resonates --

"You don't belong here," someone says, and Emma manages, at last, to turn her gaze from the mirror, to believe that maybe, this time, she hasn't imagined it.

She can't move, she can hardly breathe. This is a night beyond the one outside the castle, and...

...and that all disappears in a few growls of thunder, humming against the stones of the castle as the storm rolls by. To be replaced by another, she reminds herself. There'll be more. This is going to end. _She is going to throw you away._

"But I am here," Emma says. Her voice is quiet, but somehow it fills up this big empty room in this big empty castle with its big empty spaces. The raging malevolent force that has overwhelmed the castle closes her eyes and lowers her head, and the little smile on her face when she looks back up is one that Emma knows, but has almost never seen, because it's real.

"Anyway," she adds, feeling suddenly out of place in her jeans, next to this majestic presence with her perfect dark gown, "I've got as much right to be here as you."

When the witch smiles again, Emma does too. Probably it's as sad and messy and fearful a smile as the witch's. Emma doesn't know, because she still doesn't bother with the mirror, but she definitely feels it. "What on earth gives you that idea?" The witch is inching closer, or maybe Emma is, maybe it's that magnetic force pulling them both, so that each time she thinks to notice they've come a little nearer too one another. It's like watching the sun move, except there's no sun here, so the two of them move instead.

"The part where I can't leave, for one thing."

"You can. You've tried. I've seen you. You're just not trying as hard as you have to." Emma knows this witch more with every passing breath, and she ought to want to wrap her hands around her throat and squeeze until there are no more breaths passing. But that's not what she wants, not at all. Although the snotty tone she says that in _is_ pretty damn annoying. She almost falls for it, falls into bickering, actually, but she doesn't, which probably shows some growth as a person.

She kisses her instead. There are neither trumpets nor sudden sunlight, there are no broken curses. The castle is pretty much as big and empty as ever. But when they pull away from each other for just a second, Regina's smile is still there, and it seems a little more certain of its place now.

Emma knows the feeling.

 

Nothing about Regina's bedroom is different from how Emma remembers it, absolutely nothing, which is surprising, because Emma didn't think she remembered it all that clearly. But when they both fall still at last, in the moment before Regina remembers the light and reaches to turn it off, Emma takes the room in and yeah, it's the same. But something _feels_ different. Brighter, warmer. Hopeful-er.

"This is a terrible idea." But Regina doesn't say anything more this time, and she certainly doesn't move to fix things.

"I've had worse." Emma pulls her close, skin against skin, and closes her eyes.

Regina snorts. "Yes, I know." She still doesn't move, and when Emma wakes up in the morning, the room is bright and they're both still there and it's looking like it might -- just _might_ \-- be a beautiful day.


End file.
